Is all of Vonage completely down?

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2005 12:26 am Post subject:

1am, just getting home... Vonage line seems to be okay.

This does make me wonder how Vonage's system is set up. During the outage, I could call & receive calls from 800 #'s, my local area code, the next area code over, but other calls in the state failed.

I'm also curious as to how the Vonage servers are configured. It sonuds like they're running one large machine for everything at one data center. If so, maybe they need to consider multiple redundant data centers across the country so there is no single point of failure.

Posts: 34 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Apr 05, 2005 Posts: 34

VonageTPA wrote:

I'm also curious as to how the Vonage servers are configured. It sounds like they're running one large machine for everything at one data center. If so, maybe they need to consider multiple redundant data centers across the country so there is no single point of failure.

Obviously they are not optimally configured.

Hey Vonage, My company fixes network design issues like yours all the time. Give us a call if you can Wink

If your phones are down, you can always visit www.Think-IT-Group.com

Idea

Posts: 4 · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2005 11:28 am Post subject: Service Issues

Phone service down.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 31, 2005 Posts: 1

My lines are working again today. Any word on what caused the issues yesterday?

Posts: 2135

coyotemax wrote:

My lines are working again today. Any word on what caused the issues yesterday?

vonage-forum.com/article2094.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" class="postlink">Vonage VoIP Forum Digest - August 4, 2005

Posts: 176 · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2005 8:25 pm Post subject:

My service still hasn't totally recovered from what ever happened yesterday. It is now noisy, not reliable and incoming calls are a crap shoot. Also the 888 number that I have been using for years to call my wife at work no longer works, I get a message it is blocked, even though it is a national number. She works for a trucking company and the number is for the drivers to be able to call in from the road, no matter where they are.

I have touted how great the service is in the past, but lately it has been not so hot. Too many echoes, scratchy sounds and dropped calls. Shame.

Posts: 9 · New Forum Member Joined: Aug 01, 2005 Posts: 9

My service has still not recovered from the outage. It started on Monday night. I have called Vonage help about 4 times now.. They cannot seem to help. I still get fast busy, choppy audio, echoes, scratchy sounds and dropped calls.

I dont really know what to do.. does any one have any other ideas. I have rebooted my entire network several times. My pingplotter graphs dont show a lot of latency or droppped packets.. I have a PAP2 connected to a WRTG56 with sveasoft..

Posts: 5 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 20, 2005 Posts: 5

3 days now and I can only make calls about 10% of the time. Otherwise I get "ALL CIRCUITS BUSY". I have sold 4 friends on Vonage, but I cannot reccomend a service that I'm only able to make 2 calls in 3 days, not matter how good of savings.

Posts: 429 · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2005 3:14 pm Post subject: Re: getting to be ridiculous

shanestainton wrote:

Im LOSING money because I can neither call promoters for upcoming faires or receive calls from wholesale and custom order customers. SERIOUS money.

You need to seriously reconsider your [uninformed,misguided,poor] phone service decisions if you are actually losing "SERIOUS money", and not just exaggerating because you are frustrated.

You knew that VoIP is not as reliable as POTS before you signed up. Right??? If you only listened to Vonage commercials and had stars in your eyes over "free" long distance, without regard for whether it was the best choice for (what you imply is) a mission-critical phone system, then shame on you for not doing your homework before jumping on board such a new technology and putting your business at such dire risk. (There's an old expression: look before you leap.)

I am NOT defending Vonage. I have no particular love for them, and make no mistake, we have suffered numerous [frustrating, infuriating] outages over the past year just like many others... not to mention having our friends plagued with "all circuits are busy" errors when calling us. We are all-Vonage at home, so when service goes down, we have no alternative except my business cell phone, which I have with me during the day. My homemaker wife has no cell and is out of luck when it happens.

At work, we traded all but one of our POTS lines in for Vonage and are saving several $hundred in long distance each month. When service goes down like it did this week, it is frustrating-- VERY frustrating. Not only are we down to ONE LINE, but we have to pay per-minute for long distance via POTS (most of our customers are out of area). And because we only do that in an emergency, we cannot justify the monthly fees for a "deep discount" long distance package for the POTS line. We just suck it up and pay the piper, while reminding ourselves how much Vonage saved us in long distance the other 29 days this month. At least we are not totally "off the air" when Vonage takes a dump.

The point is, we made an informed decision to balance savings with reliability, which is why we kept our primary business line, carrying our primary (i.e., published) phone number, with POTS. We'd never be so insane as to put 100% of our phone service on a technology that is notoriously unreliable by comparison.

At least for now, you can't have your cake (free long distance) and eat it too (100% uptime) with mainstream VoIP. Some day that may change, but that day is not today.

Suck it up and order a minimal POTS line for emergencies (or quit whining) if you are really losing "SERIOUS money" every time Vonage has a meltdown.

Posts: 18 · Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 5:05 pm Post subject: Prepay Cell Phone For Emergencies

shanestainton wrote:

My homemaker wife has no cell and is out of luck when it happens.

FWIW, you can get prepay cell phones that cost as little $30 per year to keep in service. My wife and I both have one and it works very well for us in emergency situations. Of course you need to have the will power (we do) to not use them just to "yammer away" because the per minute rate is 25 cents.

I can point you to a couple of choices if you would like.